📕📗📘📙 Bitmap Books – A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games | Available 29th October 2021 📕📗📘📙 @bitmap_books

https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/a-guide-to-japanese-role-playing-games

Having previously covered – and been extremely impressed by – Bitmap Books’ Game Boy: The Box Art Collection (https://www.gamesfreezer.co.uk/2021/05/bitmap-books-game-boy-box-art.html), I already knew what to expect from them this time around. Solid, robust packaging, luxurious, glossy paper as well as well-researched and well-presented text augmented by crisp imagery and screenshots. Good.

Weighing at over a whopping 600 pages, the sheer scope of the undertaking is the first thing that grabs your attention - you know that there is some serious gold contained within these pages. The second thing that stole my attention was the cover art; the richly drawn, evocative and yet tasteful cover depicts two children sitting cross-legged in front of a CRT TV with a plethora of games and consoles scattered around them, as they play a turn-based JRPG - whilst the top half of the cover shows myriad characters in familiar poses from various games encased in fiery energy seemingly projecting from the TV itself, reflecting the collective imaginations of the children as well as the storied history of the genre.

The rear, meanwhile – shows a fantasy landscape comprising of elegant glass spires, forests, mountains and a passing zeppelin – all under an alien sky. Familiar sights to those that have spent thousands of hours playing through such worlds over the decades. It’s an almost nostalgic sight and really fits in well with the content and overall quality of the book.

The book doesn’t just launch into a chronological reading of the JRPG genre, however, as with other Bitmap Books, care is taken to glean as much information about the chosen topic as possible, to inform the reader as well set the tone for the rest of the book. Following an introduction from Kurt Kalata and a list of the over thirty contributors to the work, detailed explanations are given on topics such as what a JRPG actually is - in terms of the characteristics of the genre - a history of JRPGs in Japan as well as sections covering noted composers of certain eras, the impact of the anime style on the evolution of the genre; tropes and familiar narrative drives before the majority of the book kicks in, which deals with large franchises - finally branching out into sub-genres. It really does cover a huge amount of ground.

The setup of the coverage of each game gets given different amounts of space dependent on their place in the pantheon of JRPGs. For instance, games that are derivative of other titles, have scant information about them available or perhaps had a smaller impact are given a few paragraphs whereas the standard layout tends towards a large, full colour and high-resolution screenshot, a box-cover shot as well as a further, smaller image depicting a scene from the game and a full-page spread of text, covering the game. For all entries, the basic details such as; title, developer, release date and platforms on which the game is available are included.

Considering that there are over thirty different contributors to the book, the editing is very tight and, whilst the different articles may have subtly different tones and approaches, there’s a cohesion to them, not to mention that as much info, facts and tidbits as possible are contained in each section. I honestly feel like I learned things from every entry in the book, including the titles that I’m already very familiar with, it keeps the book feeling fresh and quite frankly, definitive. Finally, the larger franchises and keystone titles have double page-spreads – and even longer, in some series’ cases – so the writer can really explore the history and impact of each entry.

This is a book that really does feel vital to those fans of the JRPG genre and feels bible-like in its scope. It’s the perfect choice of genre for the fans as well, in that you don’t really get ‘casual’ JRPG fans due to the amount of time that needs to be sunk into them by default, so I’m very certain that this is a book that will appeal to pretty much everyone who enjoys the genre, regardless of when they began their gaming journey. On the flip side – if you have a passing interest in the JRPG genre, this is a great way to gain a fuller understanding of the history and appeal. A good book appeals to all, and this one doesn’t feel dense or bogged down in jargon, it’s a very accessible read.

Bitmap Books know how to put a great book together and this is no different. It’s an excellent resource as well as looking fantastic. Put together by a group of people that are passionate and well-read about the topic at hand and written in such a way that those emotions come across, rich with intrinsic knowledge without feeling either dry or too fanboy-ish. Good.

A definite recommendation from us at GF and such a hard thumbs-up that the cartilage is straining, and the joints have almost separated in my digits. One final thing I’d like to add that tickled me about the book – As I read these interesting and well-researched articles on hundreds of games across a litany of computer systems and consoles through decades, filled with information from people who have hundreds of years’ worth of experience in pounding through JRPGs between them, it made me smile when terms like ‘high level of challenge’ and ‘it’s quite a long game’ or ‘there’s a fair amount of grinding’ cropped up, it made me think, “wow if you think that this game is full-on…I would be STRUGGLING!” Brilliant.